Friday, April 18th, 2014

After a man urinated in one of their reservoirs, the city of Portland, Oregon will flush 38 million gallons of water, spending tens of thousands of dollars in the process. If that seems just a mite wasteful, well, you’re right. The average output for urination has a high end of around one-tenth of a gallon, which means the reservoir is now at most 1 part urine to 380,000,000 parts water. Even homeopaths wouldn’t believe that urine is going to have any effect.

Meanwhile, Portland’s Water Bureau administrator David Shaff seems very fixated on the specific type of urine in question. Note this quote:

“Even though there is very minimal public health risk, the bottom line is that our commitment is to serve water that’s clean, cold and constant. That doesn’t include pee. Not from people, at least.”

Along with this line:

“I’ve got tons of water available that doesn’t have human pee in it, so I’m going to replace this.”

The reservoir’s water is of course always full of fish urine and bird poop and plenty else. And it probably has some human urine in it from the original Bull Run source too, protected though that may be. But now that the public knows for certain that there’s a few hundred milliliters of urine in it, they’re going to dump it.

Anyhow, let’s close with a derisive quote from Mr. Shaff, this time focusing on the size of the offender’s genitalia:

“When you see the video, he’s leaning right up because he has to get his little wee wee right up to the iron bars. There’s really no doubt what he’s doing,” Shaff said.